Jesus once said, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God" (Matthew 19:24).

Jesus wasn't condemning wealth itself. Some of the greats of Biblical faith were well-off.

But wealth allows people to erect a fantasy land of invincibility and self-sufficiency in which to live. They feel neither the need for God or others nor a sense of accountability to God or others.

Few human beings have the healthy equilibrium needed to keep the wealth and the power often experienced and wielded by upper echelon executives from eroding their sense of accountability, even their sense of reality.

When hundreds or even thousands of people cater to your every whim, you gain access to financial and political power, and it seems that the fates of people you've never met depend on the decisions you make, it's easy to think that you're "all that." It's easy to turn yourself into a little god or, like the main character in Tom Wolfe's sprawling novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, a "master of the universe."

Be careful of making wealth or power goals for your life.

No matter how certain you are that you would use big money or big clout for good, unless you surrender your life and will to the God we meet in Jesus Christ, allowing Christ to live in you, you could be on the road to becoming a monster...or an inmate.